2TB of 'synced cloud storage' for just $9.95. Steal or no deal?

I've stumbled on Livedrive before in the past. Back then, they were offering 'only' 512GB of 'synced cloud storage'. Now, they've bumped it up to a whopping 2TB for only $9.95.
This sounds like a good deal, but opinions of users and reviewers on the interwebs are quite horrifying. Files getting lost or not being backupped for no reason. Non-existing support and no response to cancellation.. Although recent comments show that livedrive is in the process of improving their service.

@joepie91 said: 9,95 euro for me. Seems they just change the currency.

Oh, how stupid. I presumed since I thought they were UK based. I'm confused now, the whois has the same guy for technical and administrative but different addresses, one in the US and UK. Maybe I just need sleep.

Am with live drive I purchased the yearly pro package. Big mistake its really slow I've noticed they use pure cogent for uploads and downloads. Also video and music streaming sucks. And FTP.is only with pro package

tried with both US and Canadian IP, all shown 15.95, so it is not just you :)

http://BornIn.Asia - FREE shared hosting and subdomain service for LET members! Click here to see how to get one yourself!
96Forum: Low End VPS Discussions. Selling domains with GApp with various user counts (10 year reg incl. for some)

It is not bad, I use it on my mothers computer. But I don't use it on my own computer.

Too limited. For example you can't select anything in program files (some games still store a lot of files there that I want backed up) I would have to write scripts to move them elsewhere and then backblaze client would back them up.

It is also windows and Mac only.

I am using CrashPlan Pro now with my own private encryption Key and loving it except the Java thing as @Maurice pointed out. It is a big pig on resources.

@Maurice said: Crashplan gave out free accounts a few weeks ago. I've got it, so far it's good even though I'm not too keen on the sync program being built on Java. So what unlimited space :)

Only for Carbonite users and only in US correct? Sigh...

http://BornIn.Asia - FREE shared hosting and subdomain service for LET members! Click here to see how to get one yourself!
96Forum: Low End VPS Discussions. Selling domains with GApp with various user counts (10 year reg incl. for some)

I'm really confused. I signed up for a test account and put some TV series files into it. For some reason they didn't even need to be uploaded (maybe it just matches the hash with files that are already on their server for de-duplication?) However there is something wrong with their streaming service:

Why would a backup service be re-encoding your videos? I'd be mad if I trusted one only to find out later that it happened. Probably because I'd be backing up events where I usually have 200-300GB of video.

Suppose it's possible they're doing a live encode if it has an actual streaming interface and isn't just acting like a file download that plays via browser as it downloads (like I do with h264 streams to my iPad).

@AsadHaider said: Best way to test it, upload a new video (which they won't have) and see if you can stream it immediately.

Well it doesn't really matter how they do it as long as i can't turn it off. I just tried downloading the file again from their webinterface and it has a horrible speed (~100 kb/s). Not really feasible for backing up 2 tb.

Routing is fine for me, but they hard limit FTP uploads at ~1mbit, which is bloody useless. Downloads are fast. They denied the speed problems for a year+, and a few weeks ago they admitted it. They say they're in the process of fixing it, but I'm not sure they ever will.

@Gary said: Routing is fine for me, but they hard limit FTP uploads at ~1mbit, which is bloody useless. Downloads are fast. They denied the speed problems for a year+, and a few weeks ago they admitted it. They say they're in the process of fixing it, but I'm not sure they ever will.

Ive tried to tell them this in the past. they blamed it on a connecton my end. but when i said i was using a server they changed there tone.. there support is useless if they reply (which could take weeks)its most likely going to be a copy and paste answer.

One other thing i noticed was. when you download large files from the web interface they are corrupt most of the time. For example i downloaded a HD movie earlier which was 2.7GB full but livedrive completed the download at 1GB and wouldnt play.. and download are slow..

The only alternative i could find that offers similar amounts of storage (and seems like a proper company) is Bitcasa. However for some retarded reason they also decide to re-encode anything i upload to 120x80 100 kbit/s or so.

@gsrdgrdghd said: (maybe it just matches the hash with files that are already on their server for de-duplication

If they were actually doing this, that would be a neat solution to make sure their servers don't get full with duplicate files. I know Dropbox does this.
The re-encoding/transcoding(?) of your uploaded video when streamed in a webbrowser is not a bad idea, since not all people have fast enough connections to stream 1080p. However, there should be an option to turn this off ofcourse.

@gsrdgrdghd said: Their routing is ridicolous (my connection actually goes from the EU to NYC and from there to London). Speed is around 100 kb/s.

Now this is a real show stopper... like WTF? How can you even accomplish this. They must have tried really hard to fail that bad.

@DanielM said: One other thing i noticed was. when you download large files from the web interface they are corrupt most of the time. For example i downloaded a HD movie earlier which was 2.7GB full but livedrive completed the download at 1GB and wouldnt play.. and download are slow..

I am getting the bad feeling that they aren't actually keeping copies of your file. I get the feeling they say they keep a copy but in fact delete some parts of it. So that when you download it, a part is correct but the rest is currupt making the file unusable. Also, that download speed sucks balls.

@gsrdgrdghd said: Well the software seems to work. The speed isn't the fastest but it's ok imho. They are planning to charge 10$/month after the beta

I just reinstalled bitcasa again and it works much better than I tried it the last time (in May this year). However, what I still find lacking is that if you add a folder to 'My infinite' and it's done uploading, it won't keep syncing this folder to the cloud. So if you add or delete a file later on, it won't be uploaded or deleted..... Ofcourse you could use the 'My Sync' folder for that, but that's not what I want. I want to have a remote copy of my files and only download them when needed on my other PCs instead of eating up diskspace without use.